The life and times of MET student

Wow, I don’t know if I’m just on a roll or what, but working with Audacity was yet another pleasantly straightforward experience! I have to admit that I was slightly worried by the amount of written instructions on the E-Toolkit page, but apparently it was all for nothing.  The Audacity and accompanying LAME software was quite fast and easy to download and install, (however I think that a younger student may need a bit of guidance for which is the appropriate download for their system).  Within a few short minutes of installation I was ready to record my first audio clip.  My first recording was quite hard to hear, with a lot of background noise, but after some tinkering with the microphone, I managed to record a decent clip.  I then was able to easily export my file in MP3 format, so it is readily available to for uploading.  I think I’m getting the hang of this technology thing.  Check out my short audio clip here: TestClip

This e-toolkit experience proved to a be a pleasantly straightforward one! Although there are numerous Youtube tutorial on how to use the various features of the program, PIcasa is so easy to use, that I didn’t find them to be necessary.  As soon as I had created a few copies of photos that I wanted to play around with, I started by trying cropping and resizing.  The crop feature allows you to both manually crop, or has pre-selected sizes that you can apply to your picture.  After that, it’s as easy as pressing the “apply” button, and voila! A newly cropped picture is at your disposal.  I quickly moved on to exploring the other features, including resizing, colour adjustment, adding text, retouching, and filtering effects.  Picasa also has a great tool where you can easily add photos from your library to create a collage.  Check out the one that I created:

A collage created in Picasa of my trip to Australia.

In ETEC 510, which I am currently taking at the same time as this course, one our assignments was to create a wiki entry to contribute the UBC Wikis page.  I created my entry on my own, starting with the drafting of a word document for my entry.  This process was a bit more time consuming than creating a regular word document would be, as I had to be conscious of the formatting rules specific to wikis. Once I finished creating the content for my entry, I had to start the fairly labour intensive process of embedding it into the wiki page itself.  I spent several hours reading over wiki how-to pages in an attempt to do simple tasks such as centering text, creating bullets, and adding images (which I found to be particularly difficult to format) before I was able to create a somewhat decent page.  Overall, creating a wiki was a learning experience, but to be honest, I found myself wanting to punch my computer screen a few times during the process.

After exploring the various various synchronous technological tools suggested in the E-Toolkit, I found that DimDim was best suited for the purposes of my class website.  Firstly it was free, (at least for a 30-day trial).  Also, it seemed to be the easiest to use and setup for both student and teacher, with no downloads necessary.  I simply had to sign up for an account, (without even a confirmation email), and then I was ready get started!  All I had to do then was provide link to my conference room on my Moodle site.  This seems like a great tool for meeting with students who need extra help outside of class, or for parents who need to discuss something and cannot make a meeting time after or before school.  I was shocked and amazed at how straightforward this tool was to use! Woo hoo!

At first thought, designing a webpage seemed like a very daunting task to me; however, thanks to the very user-friendly Nvu software, and the illustrative video tutorials available, it was not as difficult as I had originally thought.  On the contrary, it was actually quite straight-forward, and almost, dare I say, easy! With the WYSIWYG HTML editor, formatting was a breeze!  This is not to say that I didn’t run into any challenges or roadblocks during the process.  I found that the process of storyboarding and formatting was quite time consuming.  I didn’t want it to meet any of the criteria on the “Webpages that Suck” page.  Also, I ran into some technical difficulties when publishing my page on Moodle, and the image that I had embedded did not appear.  After much tinkering, and some advice from a very helpful classmate, I eventually figured out that I was missing the absolute location for my image, and had to include it in the HTML code.  Once I completed this step, I successfully made my image appear on the Moodle site.  Thank goodness for my more technologically-skilled peers!!

Throughout my experience in the MET program, multimedia has been effectively used to enhance my learning experience numerous times.  The most recent example that comes to mind is in Module 4 of ETEC 365A, with the two Wesch videos, “The Machine is Us/ing Us” and “, and “A vision of students today”.  Both of these videos relating to social media illustrated a stronger point than any article could have for me.  The combination of the images and text in these videos, in the manner that they were presented, made a profound impression on me regarding how the digital age is affecting the classroom and our everyday lives.  They really left me saying, “wow”, after watching.  I can’t think of too many articles that have left me saying the same thing.

Check out my story below, about a furry pest who eventually grows on me.

To tell my educational story, I spent a lot of time browsing through the various tools outlined in “50 Ways to Tell a Story”. After much debate, I decided that I would use a tool to create a comic of my story, because I thought it would be the most interesting and relevant for my students, many of whom read graphic novels and comics. In using this tool, I was able to use pictures, dialogue, and narrative to tell my story. This made it easy to express specific characters’ points of view, as well as my own point of view as narrator. The pictures helped to quickly and effectively set the mood for each scene in the story.

If I were to use such a tool in my own teaching to produce materials for my students, I would use it as an example in our personal storytelling unit, or as an example of a different way to provide information in Science and Social Studies, (ie. the journey of a piece of food through your body, or the story of pioneers settling in Canada). Students could easily access this online comic authoring tool, PikiStrips. I can imagine that my students would find such an authoring tool exciting to use, and I would expect that it would also inspire them to be creative with both visuals and dialogue. I think that it would be an engaging learning experience for both of us!

Discussion and collaboration in the wiki space differ somewhat from what we are accustomed to in an LMS standard threaded discussion space.  In the wiki space, we have the option to share ideas and edit others’ ideas anonymously; whereas, in a discussion forum, we have no ability to edit others’ original ideas, and our names are always attached to our contributions.  I think that the option to peer edit anonymously is an advantage of using a wiki for group collaboration, as it encourages those who may be too timid to share their thoughts on another’s work to contribute.  The peer editing function of a wiki space also is beneficial because it allows for a fresh set of eyes to look over ideas before submitting a final product.  A challenge that may arise when working with others in a wiki space is when one person has a contribution that they may feel strongly about, and another person changes it.  This could lead to potential disagreements or stifling of another person’s ideas.  Another challenge in using a wiki is that the discussion function is not as structured as in a forum, and it may be difficult to come to a group consensus.

If Boris is looking for a self-directed, stand-alone review tool, which would give students instant formative feedback, then he is in luck!  The quiz function in Moodle would be a great option for him.  He could create a “review’’ quiz, with a variety of types of questions (multiple choice, matching, fill-in-the-blank, short answer, etc.) that provides students with instant feedback.  This feedback can be tailored by Boris to lead students in the right direction if they are struggling, providing suggestions for specific sections or additional resources to review.  Furthermore, Boris would likely want to allow his students to take the review quiz multiple times, so he should use the “each attempt builds on the last” option when creating his quiz.  With this function, students can build their answers over time, with responses from previous tries visible for the student the next time he or she takes the quiz.

Although it was a bit of a struggle to figure out how to set up various communication tools on my Moodle site, eventually I managed to set up a few different activities that use synchronous and asynchronous tools to support student interaction.  Firstly, I set up a one-minute response blog for students to complete after each Math lesson.  The activity asks students to quickly record in their blogs what the most important ideas of the lesson are, what points are unclear, and if they found the lesson helpful/interesting.  This is a useful formative assessment activity, providing students with a chance to reflect on key concepts, and providing teachers with an opportunity to see where there are any misconceptions/confusion, so they can re-clarify during the following lesson.

I also set up a Science activity to help conclude a Grade 5 unit studying the human body.  I posed a problem where students must work in small groups to explain why their assigned body part is important and what its functions are.  After posting their group’s response, students are instructed to read other group’s postings and provide feedback.  I chose to use a Q & A forum to support student interaction in this activity, so that students must formulate their own responses (as a group) before viewing other groups’ work.  Also, this communication tool allows for students to provide constructive peer feedback.

Finally, I set up a synchronous communication tool on my Moodle site in the form of a chat room to provide weekly online office hours.  In the heading for the chat room I included that days and times that I would be online to help students with any school-related questions that they might have.  This tool helps to provide an easily accessible and secure space where students can feel comfortable addressing any issues in the class regarding homework, social, or other problems.  It also could encourage students who may not normally approach me in person to voice their issues.

On the Moodle site, there are several tools to help track student activity.  To track blog activity, I can view course or site blog entries under the Blog Menu block.  I can also track using blog tags, which I instruct the students to include in their entries.  To monitor forum activity, I can view student activity/participation using the “reports” tool in the Administration block, which provides a record of all student activity.  I can consult the Recent Activity block to track student activity as well.  If I want to view chat room activity, I can easily view archived chats using the “view past sessions” button included in the chat tool.

Although it was a bit frustrating at first, it turned out to be very useful and informative to explore the various communication tools that Moodle has to offer!